Tag: Tony Stark

After a good half a days work on my manuscript, I figured I'd had enough of it for the moment. So I crashed on the couch, and went to watch Iron Man, which came out in 2008. Not because of Gwyneth Paltrow who is quite beautiful but just not my type, but more because of Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. Basically, because he is me....

Yes, I could totally dig being Tony, except for a few rough edges that Sander doesn't really have anymore. But the totally abundant does-as-he-pleases single guy could very well be in my future, and not give me any uneasiness if it did come true!

But this is not a movie review, at least not of any particular movie. It is more a view on moviewatching in particular, and how different people do it differently. We probably all are somewhat annoyed if in a movieviewing audience, there is this guy that constantly keeps telling you what went wrong in the making of this movie, don't we? And yet, there is an entire group of Earthlings on this very planet that have exactly that as a hobby: http://nitpickers.com/

They spend whole evening, watching every movie they can get their hands on, and diligently report their findings on the Internet. I don't think there is one movie that has received zero nitpicks, because that is what they call them. It is defined as any situation that defies believability, or in other words any deviation that places itself outside of consensus reality. Are you one of these guys too? I am! I actually in my past entered a few nitpicks, but the novelty of it wore off quickly, because they're just grubby little details, and I'm a Big Guy, aiming for the Big Connections. And just now, while doing the slicing and peeling for dinner, I came across a beauty!

Nitpickers are considered weird by many, yet we all from time to time do it. But it is what you do with your nitpicks that makes all the difference: observing them and immediately loudly alerting everyone to them usually does not promote a friendly reaction. Hence everybodies revoltion regarding the loud guy in the crowd. But let's look at a nitpick up close: if you find one, what have you found? Have you found a fact that diminishes the believability of the movie, or have you found an exception that points at a missing piece of the puzzle you call your Reality? Basically, if movies had no nitpicks, the following hierarchy would have to exist:

Movie Reality: that which the movie claims to represent

Consensus Reality: the world we agree on is real.....

Internal Reality: the world any individual holds to be possible.

Reality: the All that is, encompassing all.

Now the order of these four may vary, because depending on the genre, Movie Reality may be inside or outside Consensus Reality. And depending on the audience, it may even be outside their Internal Reality. But we can be sure of one thing: none of the other three lie outside Reality!

Now a nitpick happens when movie reality pierces the reality that it is supposed to be inside of. If that happens, you can either yell that you don't believe the movie, you don't believe that one fact, or you can refrain from such gut reactions and take a look at what is happening.

If the movie shows something that does not fit the picture you want it to conform to, you have two obvious choices: you can either disregard the part that sticks out, or you can deduce that if the movie did it, then the reality in which you think it belonged was probably not yet fully complete. In that last case you may be led on a path to discover some new 'rule' to your Internal Reality, that would explain away the nitpick. And that, my friends, is a lovely path to be on, for it is usually loaded with syncs....